Back in the mid-aughts, those swoopy banged and white belted days of yore, I spent hours upon hours updating my MySpace page. What started as sloppy code turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the site, as people were able to customize and turn their sites into personalized seizure-inducing landing pages. But as the internet evolved, we moved away from customization and on to standardized, super clean pages that delivered information, if not joy. But now, with the rise of web3 and AI-powered virtual humans, we are finally getting some of that back.
On a call a few days ago, a colleague kept using the term "talk to the manager" and the first thing that sprung to my mind was the episode of Arrested Development where George Michael wants to be called "Mister Manager." Once the call wrapped, I went onto Virti (full disclosure, I work with them, and if you click the link you can try it for free) and in about twenty minutes, I was chatting about frozen bananas and the whereabouts of George Senior with my Mister Manager avatar. Later that day, I made a Sopranos-obsessed friend a virtual Tony to try to convince he was ready to move up in the family.
One on level, this is all just fun time wasting. But this is also a possible future of fandoms and fan fiction, not to mention education and training. I'd have much rather been interviewing Abraham Lincoln in school than reading a chapter about him in a book. It is also much better for students to be able to practice negotiations or employers to practice difficult conversations with an avatar then just watching a video. But it would also be fun to whip up a virtual version of a fictional character and find out more about their story and motives and iterate from there.
One of the reasons fan fiction has become so huge is because young people without a ton of life experience can use celebrities or fictional characters are jumping off points for their own stories. Imagine letting them run wild and create and tweak conversations that lead to more independent thinking and problem solving.
There are obvious downsides to this, in the form of intellectual property and consent; but then again, how are the locked down journals where I imagined long conversations with various nineties rock stars any different? As long as there are ways to distinguish between a fan-created avatar and the actual person and guardrails to make sure the avatar doesn't dip into territory the real person would find problematic, this is a great way to let creativity flower.
Over the last twenty years the internet has become part of our daily lives, and on balance much less fun and weird. The AI powered virtual humans are a way, at least for now, to bring a little bit of play back.